New Years Resolutions!

Following slack uploading and picture taking in the last couple of months of last year, I have made some New Years targets. Armed with a diary and plan of 20 shots per week uploaded, I am going to try to get a 1000 images by the end of the year.

I've learnt the need to be more systematic and to plan the shoots before had. I'm going to list 52 subjects to shoot twice a week, uploading, hopefully, 10 from each session. I'll plan these a few weeks in advance to give time to get props and learn the techniques needed, and try to keep the pace throughout the year.

So far this year, having a couple of weeks off of the day job, I have been able to complete three shoots uploading around 30 images, all of a decent standard.

I also have the goal of joining Shutterstock, so far I have been refused 3 times. With the new shooting schedule I'm hoping to have enough new and quality pictures to be accepted by them.

Lets see what happens.......

October Summary

This month my total earnings were $6.55 with 1069 pictures online across 11 sites. Up on last month. Still very modest but in the right direction I suppose.

I set myself a loose goal to upload 10 images a week. I kept to this for 2 weeks, but I'm struggling to keep this rate up. A busy couple of weeks at work and a lack of inspiration have been my biggest problems. I purchased a new flash this month to help with some studio shots but a delay in delivery and me not being able to work out how to get both my flashes working together has slowed me down. 

Looking to November, I'm going to try to upload a total of 20 good images this month, but more importantly work out a shoot list and do the research needed to take the pictures. I'm finding I'm really limited by my technical capabilities at the moment. I need to try to divide my time between coming up with concepts, researching shooting techniques, shooting, key wording and uploading. 

These are my graphs:

Uploading, keywording, uploading....

Over the last couple of days I've been going through a list of top microstock sites and applying as a contributor. Once accepted I've been busy laboriously and inefficiently uploading and keywording my images.

I've found Yuri Arcurs' keywording tool useful so far.

I'm now working through each agency at a time to get them all up to date with my base portfolio of 60 odd images that have been accepted by Istockphoto.

I can see the need to workout a more efficient workflow so that I'm only keywording once. All the agencies differ in how time consuming the process is, but each would be easier if I had the metadata sorted on the computer first. I'll be researching this once I have the first set of uploading done.

Agencies I've applied to are:

Dreamstime - Accepted
Bigstockphoto - Accepted
Fotolia - Accepted
Crestock - Accepted
Depositphotos - Accepted
Shutterstock - Declined. Have to wait 30-days to resubmit.

Starting Point....

As it stood at the end of August 2011 I had the following number of images and sales:

Portfolio Size & Earnings End August 2011:

Agency	Size	Downloads	Total Earnings $
	334	1	22
Istockphoto	67	5	5.90